Concord public schools to get second school resource officer

Monday

With a near-unanimous vote at the special Town Meeting earlier in October, the Concord Police Department secured funding to hire a second school resource officer.

“If you talk with young people, they may not talk about it openly all the time, but they’re confronted with some very complex issues,” Concord Police Chief Joseph O’Connor said. “But we believe if we take a proactive stand and have the second resource officer, we’ll be able to work with the schools to develop additional programming, that we can have interventions earlier and that we can have preventative initiatives as well.”

The National Association of School Resource Officers recommends employing one school resource officer for every 1,000 students. Town Manager Chris Whelan said that, with approximately 3,300 students in the Concord Public Schools, the department has one school resource officer, Detective Scott Camilleri, who also serves as the town’s elder affairs officer.

Town officials said the additional school resource officer would focus on the Concord Middle School, allowing Camilleri to focus more of his attention on Concord-Carlisle High School.

Camilleri helps oversee emergency drills conducted in the schools, gives lectures in some of the elementary schools for the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program and helps middle-schoolers learn the difference between jokes and bullying behavior in their family and consumer science classes.

On top of the programming, Camilleri said it's his job to make connections with the students and faculty and help build trust between the young people and the police.

“I spend my day being a resource for staff and students, being available and being approachable,” Camilleri said.

Having school resource officers connects back to the department’s mission to emphasize community policing, Camilleri said, where police officers aren’t just strangers who show up at crime scenes, but trusted members of the community.

“They see me at their games. They see me at lunch. They come up and ask me questions,” Camilleri said. “They see me at their plays and it’s amazing to see these kids I see every day in the halls on stage singing and dancing.”

Sally Quinn Reed, executive director of the Center for Parents and Teachers in Concord, said her organization had supported the warrant article because of the impact Camilleri had made in the role.

“Officer Camilleri has done a wonderful job and he brings a real understanding of the community and a real understanding of how students are developing and the right way to engage with them because of that,” Quinn Reed said. “Having an additional person will hopefully allow them to reach even more students and faculty.”

The funding for the position has been subsidized with donations from the Concord-Carlisle Community Chest. For the 2019 fiscal year, the town has agreed to pay $48,000 and the Concord-Carlisle Community Chest has contributed an additional $17,000.

Chairman of the Concord Finance Committee Tom Tarpey said his committee encouraged voters not to take action on the article, due to concerns over funding requests coming in the middle of a budget cycle.

“Generally Mister Whelan will sit in with us and provide us with a full list of all the funding requests that his department heads have requested,” Tarpey said. “We all know it's impossible for the town to meet all of those requests, most of which are well worth funding, but in their totality aren't within the ability of the town to fund.”

Because this request happened outside of that procedure, Tarpey argued that it was not being considered in the context of other town services that also needed government funding.

“We recommend no action on this article not because we take issue with the particular matter of the article,” Tarpey said. “Rather we recommend no action because it comes outside of the usual budget cycle.”

These concerns, while echoed by some in the community, were largely pushed aside by parents concerned about school safety.

“I think it would be unconscionable to not vote on this because of procedure or where it falls in the overall budget process,” Jonathan Cash, parent of two girls in the Concord Public Schools, said. “I think it is imperative that we look at improving safety and security in the school and I think the SRO, the school resource officer, is a critical means of doing that.”

With the article approved, the Concord Police Department has begun the search for the right candidate for the role.

O’Connor said that he plans to fill the position with an experienced officer from the department and then backfill for that officer’s role.